Standing in the Same Room
by greyslostwho
Summary: Tag to Mayhem on a Cross. Booth/Brennan/Sweets. Angsty, but satisfying. ******SPOILERS****** R&R!


**THEY WERE ****JUST**** THREE PEOPLE**

**Tag to Mayhem on a Cross, possibly one of the best episodes this season, right up there with Con-man in the Meth Lab. What did this episode not have?? We got dark Booth, cute B&B, angsty Brennan, lots and lots of Sweets, Stephen Fry… the only thing I'm missing right now is a Hodgela reconciliation. Being a Brit, I love Stephen Fry (yeah, we all do) and I heart Gordon Wyatt… only he could sit there and just _tell _Sweets about B&B like that. And he is every fanfiction writer's answer, when he judged the B&B relationship like that. I think we all didn't want him to go… he would probably have joined the ranks with Angela and Caroline and been up there with the on-screen BB shippers!! ;)**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Bones, or anything to do with it… :'(**

They were just three people, standing in the same room.

They were just three people, their lives broken behind them.

They were just three people, torn apart at the very seams.

They were just three people, hiding fragility behind false invincibility.

He'd been a punch-bag, an outlet for drunken anger, the victim of nothing but his own childhood. Desperate from the very start to protect, to cherish, to fight for the less able. Now all he had left to protect was _her. _Driven into darkness, into madness into anger, finding his only outlet being a killer, taking away lives, hating himself for every moment of it. Loving passionately, hating passionately, _feeling _passionately. Everything was adoration, anger, revenge. Nothing was done by halves, nothing could be done by halves – he had to make everything in his life worthwhile, for every accusation and belief of worthlessness he had grown up with. Everything had to be pushed into a box, nothing could ever be brought up… as long as he didn't have to admit the humiliating and horrific way he had been treated, he would never have to relive them – he was big on denial, on pretending there was nothing wrong, on the goofy smiles, the jokes… he had sacrificed more than he even let himself remember for the sake of everyone whose path he crossed, his mother he had quite literally stood in front of, his brother he had shielded, shoved into safe, warm spaces, his own son, he would give everything for without thought, without consequence, Teddy Parker, how he had _tried… _And the number of times he had thrown himself in the way of bullets meant for her, the number of times his heart had lurched for a moment at the fear he might have been two seconds too late… And yet still, the words drummed into him from the age of three would creep up on his dreams sometimes.

_You worthless bag of dirt, Seeley. You're useless._

_You mean nothing._

She was a blank. She'd been abandoned, practically thrown out of the car on the side of the road. She'd been left in oblivious confusion, unsure what she could possibly have done wrong, but forever blaming herself. She'd been punished for being human, for making mistakes, for _breaking a dish. _She'd spent her whole adult life trying to rationalise how unfair it was, and the words coming from the therapist's mouth… they were so much what she had been needing for fifteen years she couldn't think. She was… nothing, irrelevant, unloved for so long she stopped believing in it altogether. Never sharing, always forcing rationality down on everything whilst she accessed the only thing she thought she had left – her brain, her intelligence, her objectivity. She'd learnt, from the day she'd found herself alone in the world, that emotion was futile, it wouldn't get you anything, not a miracle, not a pardon, not some small mercy. So she'd removed herself from it, pretended she didn't have it, tried to obliterate it completely. In turn, in it's own revenge, it broke her inside, eating her up from the heart outwards, burning and breaking as it went. When people came back into her life she'd never thought could, when she finally laid her mother to rest, when she believed her very best friend to be dead and gone forever…

_She was forgotten as soon as she was found._

_She meant nothing._

He was an artist's canvas, for brush strokes too terrible for most people to ever consider. He'd been helpless, hardly able to understand what was happening, hardly able to write his own name, and he'd been subject to things grown men would wince when thinking about. He had hardly questioned it, he had hardly thought anything of it… he hadn't known it wasn't normal, he hadn't known he didn't deserve it. It wasn't til he'd been… _saved, _that he realised there was more to life than pain, there was more to life than suffering. He'd spent years of his life nameless, worthless, and suddenly he was everything to two people… people who he hadn't even known. That was the first time he saw there could be any kind of good in a world that had only been against him. He'd grown up haunted, there are some scars even love; unconditional, unfounded and never-ending love cannot erase, and he buried himself in _giving something back. _He had to, for fear of going insane. And the loss of the two people that had saved him… that broke him far more than anything two strangers who happened to have produced him could ever have carved into his skin. But he would never forget the unjustified torture, the pain, and the inability to grasp it… why he had to hurt.

_He'd been broken and bleeding in his earliest memory._

_Then, he meant nothing._

But right now, as he watched the others, he could see them through the glasses of the skills he had devoted his life to learning. He watched his face during her outburst, the pain that instantly etched itself into his features… he watched her shake slightly as she tried to rationalise even that, even now, and he watched his walls shoot up, the cannons come down, defences ready – he wasn't one to give things like that up easily, and he… it physically hurt him to watch her do the same. He watched how she was the only one who could possibly have got even that small confession out of him, heard his choked voice, he watched her own eyes fill up as he spoke, and he knew, then. He knew that each other's pain will always hurt them more than their own painful memories. That they value each other's happiness higher than their own and always would. And then he knew and understood what Gordon Wyatt had said, but he would add something, as he watched him stiffen when she had her hand on his chest, just for a second. Feeling his heartbeat. She knew, too, he thought… she just didn't understand it, not yet.

For a moment, he stared at them both.

They were just three people, standing in the same room, the broken half of a makeshift family.

But not really.

They were just two people, dancing on the edge of something more, hearts breaking at each other's pain, living to help the other… and if he could prescribe one thing that he knew would help them both right then it would have been for them to hold each other until it became easier to forget – it went without saying that that was what they needed.

They were indeed two people, pretending, and failing, that they weren't one and the same.

And he was just one person, standing in the same room as them, and a little less broken because of that.

**A/N 2: I'm still reeling from this episode. It's going on my metaphorical lists of faves, and I'm betting it's gonna spawn hundreds of little oneshots. And Sweets' book title at the end… who didn't squee?? And I was about to cry, I think, in Brennan's outburst. It was so…raw… Kudos to Emily Deschanel :)**

**I've never written sort-of from Sweets' angle before, I hope it turned out ok. Let me know, and if you don't hear from me again it's because the Twilight fandom have killed me for updating this instead of my massive twilight fic :S**

**Reviews are always appreciated.**


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